README.md

BOWER

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated
solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the
package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated
build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared
between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Bower runs over Git, and is package-agnostic. A packaged component can be made
up of any type of asset, and use any type of transport (e.g., AMD, CommonJS,
etc.).

Installing Bower

Also make sure that git is installed as some bower
packages require it to be fetched and installed.

Usage

Much more information is available via bower help once it's installed. This
is just enough to get you started.

Warning

On prezto or oh-my-zsh, do not forget to alias bower='noglob bower' or bower install jquery\#1.9.1

Running commands with sudo

Bower is a user command, there is no need to execute it with superuser permissions.
However, if you still want to run commands with sudo, use --allow-root option.

Installing packages and dependencies

Bower offers several ways to install packages:

# Using the dependencies listed in the current directory's bower.json
bower install
# Using a local or remote package
bower install <package>
# Using a specific version of a package
bower install <package>#<version>
# Using a different name and a specific version of a package
bower install <name>=<package>#<version>

Where <package> can be any one of the following:

A name that maps to a package registered with Bower, e.g, jquery. ‡

A remote Git endpoint, e.g., git://github.com/someone/some-package.git. Can be
public or private. ‡

A URL to a file, including zip and tar files. Its contents will be
extracted.

‡ These types of <package> might have versions available. You can specify a
semver compatible version to fetch a specific release, and lock the
package to that version. You can also use ranges to specify a range of versions.

All package contents are installed in the bower_components directory by default.
You should never directly modify the contents of this directory.

Using bower list will show all the packages that are installed locally.

N.B. If you aren't authoring a package that is intended to be consumed by
others (e.g., you're building a web app), you should always check installed
packages into source control.

Finding packages

To search for packages registered with Bower:

bower search [<name>]

Using just bower search will list all packages in the registry.

Using packages

The easiest approach is to use Bower statically, just reference the package's
installed components manually using a script tag:

<scriptsrc="/bower_components/jquery/index.js"></script>

For more complex projects, you'll probably want to concatenate your scripts or
use a module loader. Bower is just a package manager, but there are plenty of
other tools -- such as Sprockets
and RequireJS -- that will help you do this.

Registering packages

Your package must be available at a Git endpoint (e.g., GitHub); remember
to push your Git tags!

Then use the following command:

bower register <my-package-name> <git-endpoint>

The Bower registry does not have authentication or user management at this point
in time. It's on a first come, first served basis. Think of it like a URL
shortener. Now anyone can run bower install <my-package-name>, and get your
library installed.

Configuration

Defining a package

You must create a bower.json in your project's root, and specify all of its
dependencies. This is similar to Node's package.json, or Ruby's Gemfile,
and is useful for locking down a project's dependencies.

NOTE: In versions of Bower before 0.9.0 the package metadata file was called
component.json rather than bower.json. This has changed to avoid a name
clash with another tool. You can still use component.json for now but it is
deprecated and the automatic fallback is likely to be removed in an upcoming
release.

For a better of idea how this works, you may want to check out our bin
file.

When using bower programmatically, prompting is disabled by default. Though you can enable it when calling commands with interactive: true in the config.
This requires you to listen for the prompt event and handle the prompting yourself. The easiest way is to use the inquirer npm module like so:

Completion (experimental)

Bower now has an experimental completion command that is based on, and works
similarly to the npm completion. It is
not available for Windows users.

This command will output a Bash / ZSH script to put into your ~/.bashrc,
~/.bash_profile, or ~/.zshrc file.

bower completion >> ~/.bash_profile

A note for Windows users

To use Bower on Windows, you must install
msysgit correctly. Be sure to check the
option shown below:

Note that if you use TortoiseGit and if Bower keeps asking for your SSH
password, you should add the following environment variable: GIT_SSH -
C:\Program Files\TortoiseGit\bin\TortoisePlink.exe. Adjust the TortoisePlink
path if needed.